Standard month-end account statement generation processes can take five or more days for a corporate accounting department to complete. Though such processes are now somewhat automated by certain accounting software programs, they remain manually intensive in various aspects. For example, prior systems generate and print statements as a batch printing job, whereby all account statements in the batch may only be printed together (in order to prevent duplicate billing or the loss of individual statements). After printing, the statements are manually reviewed for accuracy and appearance in a quality review process, after which the statements are distributed to the appropriate billed parties. If problems in any statements are discovered during quality review, the data for any such erroneous statements must be re-entered into the accounting system and the entire batch printing job must be run again. This can substantially increase the time it takes to disseminate account statements, thereby negatively impacting the amount of time it takes a company to collect billed amounts or to report account data to its clients.
In addition, in many large scale corporate departments, account statement generation programs must retrieve data from diverse computing systems or platforms that may be employed in various corporate departments. The collection of data across multiple platforms is prone to error and requires time-consuming cross-checking in order to properly confirm the accuracy of any account statements generated in that environment.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and apparatus for accommodating quality review in an automated account statement generation process that addresses certain problems in existing technologies.